Conference

A fundamental problem in ecology is how individual-level behavior produces macroecological outcomes. The challenges involved in addressing this issue are not only related to the complexity that nature exhibits across scales but also to the fact that theoretical approaches are inevitably scale-constrained, focusing either on the small or large scales. In this seminar, I will present how we applied the multiscale framework that collaborators and I have developed to address the kilometer-scale patterns produced by plankton communities. To further our understanding regarding their bottom-up regulation, we performed a coarse-graining procedure of an agent-based model for a phytoplankton-zooplankton community. The coarse-graining procedure provides a scalable density-field description that maps large-scale features of spatial patterns to individual-level behavior. This powerful connection can guide remote-sensing applications: revealing species' traits and behavior and helping to anticipate regime shifts in the ocean.